Light
“What’s that light?” she had asked of the faint glow that persisted when the hanging torch doubling as tent reading light was off. “Is it a car?” That had quickly been ruled out. When the airbed was found to be slowly deflating three hours later, we discovered the real, glorious cause. We had been reading under canvas while the sky finally shed the last flickers of day, but the replacement that now confronted us was so big and breathtaking, it felt like God himself had let our airbed down so we would see it. They were all there, the formations faintly visible from home, the plough, the Southern Cross, bold and bright, and all the unheralded stars too, flickering with varying intensity in the spaces between, accompanied by the sense of billions more in the distant beyond. And right over us, the Milky Way spanned the curve of the heavens like a celestial archway. After that, my heart was light against the hard ground.
Grant Shimmin is a South African-born poet resident in New Zealand, who counts humanity, nature, and their relationship as poetic passions. He has work published/forthcoming at Roi Faineant Press, Does it Have Pockets?, The Hooghly Review, underscore_magazine, Amethyst Review, Blue Bottle Journal, Epistemic Lit and elsewhere.
Amethyst Review 